Willem Jongman: Gibbon Was Right: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Economy https://delong.typepad.com/jongman-gibbon-was-right.pdf: 'To qualify as real economic growth, both population and per capita incomes... must move in the same direction, and for a lengthy period of time. Did this ever happen before the Industrial Revolution? It is my contention that Rome in the late Republic and early Empire was one of those rare examples... [like] the Dutch Republic and England in the centuries just before the Industrial Revolution.... Roman material culture of the early Empire was unprecedented, and would remain unsurpassed for many centuries (until, perhaps, a century ago).... Roman grandeur was more than brick and marble, and included a new prosperity for many if not all.... Only archaeology... can provide the large datasets... for a time series analysis of long term economic change in antiquity.... The independent repetition of the same pattern in a large number of separate archaeological datasets argues firmly against too much scepticism.... Hopkins... Roman shipwrecks.... Calatay... metal extraction.... Wood... from western and southern Germany.... We can see an improved standard of living... in the face of a rising population.... This new wealth was also, I now believe, shared more widely than earlier pessimistic critics of Roman society such as myself were willing to acknowledge.... New fruits and vegetables... Pigs, cows, sheep, or horses, and even chickens, were much larger than ever before, and for a long time after...
#noted #2019-12-16
